About Us
The Seneca ECE Lab School is a community childcare center as well as a teaching school through the ECE program at Seneca College. We opened our doors in 1969 two years after the ECE Program began at Seneca College. In 1992 the Lab School moved to its permanent site in Toronto, Ontario, Canada on the traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, also known as Seneca College’s Newnham Campus. The program provides care for Toddler, and Preschool children. We are also a site for teaching and learning often referred to as a model school for the ECE students at Newnham Campus, serving as a primary site for observation, research and field practicum.
We have been committed to professional learning, reflective practice and building a shared community, where all members are free to pursue interests and the holistic development of themselves in relation to others.
The Lab School explores current pedagogical approaches, theories and practices to support curriculum planning/making, environmental design in the processes for learning and living well together. We co-create pedagogies that are situational and contextual to our setting and on the land in which we are guests. We respond and nurture our relationship and our connections with the land and nature.
We co-create an environment that honors children as capable and confident learners. We hold a strong view of the child as a protagonist in their own learning. Learning with and together with others, land, materials and self. When the environment acts as the third teacher, the children can become researchers and builders of theories who initiate their learning experiences through the exploration and investigation of quality materials in relation with them and others.